Posts Tagged ‘Money Management’

18 items.

Fraudster nails Lois Lane voice actress…

by Colleen Doran on June 6th, 2010
Posted In: Creator Resources, Agents/managers, Blog, Culture, Comics, Comics History, Culture, Film and Television, Creator Resources, Legal, Creator Resources, Money Management

…and a lot of other people, including “Superman” screenwriter Robert Benton.

Previous posts on investment evildoers include this one on Bernie Madoff. Some good links, including a very interesting article at The Skeptic by Stephan Greenspan, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado where he teaches about scams, scammers and the scammed. He’s also one of Madoff’s victims.

But back to our latest example of bottom feeder.

Kenneth Starr was a trusted Hollywood and Wall Street insider. He’s believed to have defrauded clients out of $30 million.

According to this article, Uma Thurman raised the alarm:

The Kill Bill actress stormed into the office of accountant Kenneth Starr to confront him over the loss of £700,000 of her money.

Although he paid her back in full, as news spread to his other high-profile clients, Starr’s Ponzi-style scheme collapsed and the FBI was informed.

At the New York Times, it’s Sylvester Stallone who’s credited with the first salvo:

That began to change after a 2002 lawsuit by Sylvester Stallone accused Mr. Starr of mismanaging a failed investment in Planet Hollywood. Mr. Starr’s private life also became more tumultuous — he left his third wife in 2007 for Diane Passage, a pole dancer and former stripper at Scores, the Manhattan club…the marriage alarmed clients. “When your business manager marries a stripper, that’s a tell,”

Funny, the goofball who robbed me some years back had a taste for prostitutes who did things with tootsie rolls. Apparently, guys who like to get nasty shouldn’t be trusted with money. I’ll have to be on the lookout for that.

Starr’s disgruntled client list is, well, awesome. Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, Diane Sawyer, Mike Nichols, James Wiatt, Al Pacino, Martin Scorcese. Dang.

Voice actress Joan Stanton, AKA Lois Lane, died last year aged 94.

Mrs. Stanton was a dark-haired beauty, model and stage actress before she became a radio star, performing on many shows, including “Perry Mason,” in which she played the loyal secretary Della Street. But it was as Lois Lane, the intrepid but perpetually imperiled reporter for The Daily Planet, where she was a colleague of Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, that she became a fixture in pop culture.

And if you are reading this and contemplating sharing your shadenfreude at the expense of the rich, silly creative people, think again:

Creators who strike it rich and enjoy the great privilege of having enough money to do their work don’t incite my envy. People aren’t trying to get rich just because they want to sit on their asses and eat bon bons. They want to have money to pursue their art and they want to have money so that they do not become a burden on others. If you don’t want to end up on the dole in your old age, or you don’t want to end up blegging if you get cancer, or you don’t want to end up in a job you hate never able to do the job you love, all that takes money…

What sick mixed messages this ambivalence about material success sends to creators. They are constantly told they are fools for being artists, doing work for the love. Then they are told they are fools for doing art for money. They are fools for not managing money well. Then they are told that artists are constitutionally incapable of handling money because they are foolish artists.

They are scorned for seeking out people they can trust to help them with that money, especially if they get robbed later. Robbed of money they should never have had in the first place, for if they were real artists, they wouldn’t have money.

Only hacks get rich.

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Mark Evanier on freelancing

by Colleen Doran on May 25th, 2010
Posted In: Blog, Culture, Comics, Culture, Comics, Comics History, Creator Resources, Money Management, Creator Resources, Publishing

I’m out today, but here’s something I hope you read, following up on Steve Bissette’s posts about the difficult life of Steve Perry and freelancing in general.

Mark Evanier is required reading for anyone considering the creative life as a profession.

While I don’t want to be the voice of reason that buzzkills your art dreams, the fact is few people can make a full- time living in this business. Fewer still can sustain a long term career in the creative arts.

A few days ago, I wrote about my difficulties financing A Distant Soil, and the debt I incurred trying to push the project forward (read comments section as well). It’s hard to know when to let something go. Or when to keep pushing through.

Many creators lie to themselves and everyone else about their professional prospects. Instead of getting a day job between assignments, they sit for months or years without paying gigs. They incur huge debts they can never repay, or take lousy assignments they’re ashamed of, always hoping for the big payday that never comes.

Not being a full-time creator is not some kind of art crime. Sometimes it is better to get that day job and do art on the side. You may even appreciate it more when you don’t have to rely on art for money.

This job has no benefits, no guarantees. Nothing. If you don’t make enough money to pay for every dime of your health care, your retirement, and all your business expenses, you are not making it as a professional creator. Getting by is not good enough.

Self awareness is key in this business, and few creators have it. We live on dreams.

But dreams don’t pay the bills.

It is possible to have that day job and have your dreams nights and weekends, you know. Let some other job finance those dreams with benefits.

Think about it.

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Mailbag

by Colleen Doran on May 13th, 2010
Posted In: Blog, Blog, Mailbag

Ms. Doran,

I am about to publish a comic. I have read your posts on publishing ADS and I am wondering what do you think of print on demand? I plan on printing 200 copies and to sell them mostly at cons. I still have a day job and just need this venture to bring in some extra money.

Is there any advice you could give me about self publishing comics on a smaller scale?

Thank you
Brad De Rocher

There is too little information here to be specific to your case, but I do like Print on Demand.

What little I can glean from your letter, however, prompts this:

Do not expect to self publish comics as a sideline to make extra money. Especially not on 200 copies of a comic, even if manufactured print on demand.

By way of comparison, on over 2,000 copies of A Distant Soil comic books, sold via distributors, we do little better than break even.

I do not know how much your comic costs, or what your profit margin is. And the likelihood that an unknown, untried creator will sell 200 copies of a comic at one convention is almost nil.

Conventions are expensive. If your comic costs $4, and you profit $2 on each copy sold, the most you can expect to make is $400. In my experience, unless attending a small, local show which gives you free table space, it is not likely that you will make a profit even if you sell out your entire inventory at one show. The cheapest table space I have seen lately runs about $50. And I saw many creators, even well known ones at big shows like C2E2, moving almost no books this year.

Consider the time investment of attending that convention. If you were paying yourself minimum wage, how much did you cost yourself? How much money did you pay yourself to work on that comic in the first place?

If you are not factoring in your time as an expense, you are not being realistic about your profit goals.

My recommendation is that you expect to make no profit on your first book at all. Try a local show which will grant you free space. Print no more than 30. See how your book is received.

If you do well and can afford to, print more and try again.

200 copies for a beginner is too much. That’s hundreds of dollars of investment. And since you intend to publish these comics as a sideline to make profit, the key is to keep overhead dead low.

The best that can happen is that your book sells out, you make a profit, you go back and print some more.

But with your plan, your worst case scenario is you sell few or none, lose hundreds on the printing costs, and go into the hole for conventions expenses. And have nothing for your time.

I am not trying to discourage you, I am trying to help you be realistic about your goals.

I wish you the best of luck.

c

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Webcomicker Talking Smack ‘Bout Distant Soil, YO!

by Colleen Doran on May 11th, 2010
Posted In: Blog, A Distant Soil Blog Posts, Blog, A Distant Soil FAQ, Blog, Colleen's Work, Culture, Comics, FAQ

OK.

Jamie Coville informs me some webcomicker at the Toronto Festival told a room full of people that I had restarted A Distant Soil five times and apparently this is due to some massive insecurity on my part.

For the record:

ADS First Publisher:

The original publishing contract clearly stated that I was to own my own work, but with every couple of issues, the indicia went through a morph, and in the end, the publisher claimed copyright as well as trademark. For themselves. When the lawyer hit the fan, the original publisher also claimed I was just hired to do the art and A Distant Soil was created by the publisher.

Naturally, I was not pleased with this development, and so left the publisher, spent years wrangling for the rights, and got them.

Since the original art was shot (mostly) from pencils, and since I wanted a clean break with the old company, I decided to redo the book from scratch. This would also preclude further claims by this old company to authorship.

ADS Second Publisher:

This is the only time I rewrote and redrew my book from scratch.

I would have been happy and content with this situation, but THIS HAPPENED.

I repeat: this is the only time I redid my book. From the beginning. From scratch. Period.

Three years after I signed on, the publisher closed its trade line, and sold all our contracts. Illegally. Lawsuit ensued. Authors got their rights and a financial settlement.

However, the graphic novel editions were in color and there was no way to recover those color negatives. (EDIT) Original plan was to publish black and white comics and to have these dudes publish color GN reprints. Instead we got a perfect storm of bummer.

What to do? Do I walk away, or do I try to give it another go – which could not possibly have anything to do with two publishers who violated the contracts of a dozen authors! When you take your book to another publisher, you’re showing signs of emotional insecurity, OMG, the horror?

This has nothing to do with wanting to finish your project, economic concerns, or legal rights issues!

I decided to give self publishing a go. I touched up the art to make it more attractive in black and white, added some pages to flesh out a couple of scenes and make chapter breaks, and soldiered on.

That was in 1991.

I went to Image Comics in 1996, and did not restart my book. I picked up the series at Image with issue #15.

I have published a trade paperback edition (which is not restarting the book,) and online (which is not restarting the book. A new edition is not a restart. It’s a reprint.)

There have been more editions of Sandman than there have been of A Distant Soil. More editions of Bone. More editions of Finder.

TWO comic book editions. TWO graphic novel editions. Since 1980. This is excessive?

I am very sorry some people feel vast amounts of inconvenience that I have not finished my book.

I’d love to just sit around and draw whatever I want, but I can’t do that. I have to make a living.

The income on the last issue of A Distant Soil was about $200. Which means I worked on it for two months for $200.

Which means that the money I had to live on for two entire months and to finance any book overhead took about $8,000 out of my savings.

Let me repeat that.

Last issue cost me $8,000. The issue before that cost about $7,000.

I don’t have spare time to work on comics. This is what I do for a living. If a book is not bringing in profit, that money has to come from somewhere else.

While I receive royalty checks on ADS graphic novels, this modest income I chose to use to bring the book online for everyone to read in hopes of creating another income stream to finance further work. It took almost two year’s of ADS GN royalties to pay for a web tech to design and build my sites, deal with the hack back in January, cover online access and registrations, advertising, etc. It took one royalty check to pay for my booth at San Diego. I get two checks a year.

And I am sure this webcomicker person didn’t mean any harm, so I am happy to have the opportunity to clear this up.

I wonder if they will put a tip in my donation box. They haven’t so far.

Seriously, if I had enough money to do nothing but sit down and draw A Distant Soil, I would very happily do nothing else. Not to say my other work isn’t fulfilling and wonderful, but it’s dead annoying to have other people act like they have somehow been harmed by my failure to perform on cue for free. To add injury to injury, a failure to perform while incurring HUGE FREAKING DEBT.

I’m sorry if this is cranky.

Well, not really.

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Welcome, Art Students!

by Colleen Doran on April 26th, 2010
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, copyright/trademark, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Education, Creator Resources, Legal, Creator Resources, Money Management, Creator Resources, Publishing

Your teachers inform me that you have been given an assignment: READ COLLEEN’S BLOG!

So, welcome to the students of the Center For Cartoon Studies, The Minneapolis College of Art, The Art Institute, The Ringling College, and other arty places of note.

I’m going to make things easy on you this week by posting links directly to articles which will be of use to you.

This will save you lots of time searching about for the meaty posts which will turn you into Teh Uber-Awesome Wise Creators of the Future.

It will also save me blogging time. Which is a time management aware-behavior, a very important skill for creators.

Late Payments Cost Creators: an overview of the REAL cost of lagging invoices.

An unpaid debt of $1,000 is not an unpaid debt of $1,000. If the freelancer is carrying debt on credit cards with an average interest rate of 15%, that unpaid debt of $1,000 over the course of two years just cost an additional $347.35.

Consequently, for every $1,000 the client has not paid, the freelancers have lost that $347.35 in interest, and the face value of the $1,000 has dropped to $652.65. In only two years, the $1,000 has lost more than a third of its value.

Book Packagers Behaving Badly: just because you have a book contract, that does NOT mean the publisher is on the hook for what happens to you.

Dearest Freelancer, I hate to break it to you, but when your creep of a book packager attempts to dazzle you with their connection to the Big Name Publisher, you do realize that you do NOT work for the Big Name Publisher, you actually work for the creep of a book packager. You do not have ANY agreement with the publisher. You have an agreement with the PACKAGER. Therefore, you do not get any perks, any cache, any brownie points whatsoever for your credit with Big Name Publisher. The packager does.

Working on spec usually sucks, but publishers who threaten freelancers with lawsuits for spurious reasons suck even more. This comment thread WOULD NOT DIE, and it is valuable for info as well as major snarkity snark guffaws. Do not miss!

I wrote about your original solicitation for work, described as a blind email. This has been pointed out over and over again as well. Your claim that you actually knew “most” of the creators you solicited may be true (I really don’t care,) but “knowing” a creator and sending them an email does not confer legal rights of confidentiality to you.

You opine that your poorly written book press releases are the subject of derision, but I fail to see how anyone could defend them as quality work.

Be that as it may, the press releases and the solicitation are two different matters, though they both call into question your professional standards (and I recommend a rewrite on that press material). There is nothing in my post or subsequent comments that state you sent the job solicitation out as a press release. It is clearly stated – and redundantly redundant – that your solicitation for work was in an email.

For someone with a personal dialogue with Al Bigley, your company was quick to threaten to sue him. What a pal.

Some interesting follow-up in this rambling post about plagiarism. Not my best blogging, but there are useful bits of info in the comments thread about fair use law.

Also, if Leifeld worked on a project for Marvel and swiped the work of another Marvel artist, well, that is plagiarism but not copyright violation.

Legally, Marvel is the author of the work, not Rob. Marvel owns everything Marvel produces. Marvel can’t take from Marvel.

If you work for Marvel and swipe something from an artist working for another company, then you expose Marvel to liability. It’s not a good thing to do to your client. But I can’t think of any instance of DC suing over an artist swipe at Marvel (or elsewhere). Can anyone point to an instance of same? I don’t mean old news like the Superman/Shazam. Something recent?

I know of one instance where an artist was blacklisted from Marvel for years for swiping an album cover. Marvel was sued by the singer and had to pay a big settlement. And so did the artist.

Plagiarism and copyright…not the same thing.

PART II in this series of links for students. This crop is about TIME MANAGEMENT.

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